“A new edition of the Cryptonomicon?”
“Perish the thought! Damn me, I’d almost forgotten about that old thing. Wrote it a quarter-century ago. Consider the times! The King was losing his mind-his Ministers being lynched in Parliament-his own drawbridge-keepers locking him out of his own arsenals. His foes intercepting letters abroad, written by that French Papist wife of his, begging foreign powers to invade us. Hugh Peters had come back from Salem to whip those Puritans into a frenzy-no great difficulty, given that the King, simply out- out-of money, had seized all of the merchants’ gold in the Tower. Scottish Covenanters down as far as Newcastle, Catholics rebelling in Ulster, sudden panics in London-gentlemen on the street whipping out their rapiers for little or no reason. Things no better elsewhere-Europe twenty-five years into the Thirty Years’ War, wolves eating children along the road in Besancon, for Christ’s sake-Spain and Portugal dividing into two separate kingdoms, the Dutch taking advantage of it to steal Malacca from the Portuguese-of course I wrote the Cryptonomicon! And of course people bought it! But if it was the Omega-a way of hiding information, of making the light into darkness-then the Universal Character is the Alpha-an opening. A dawn. A candle in the darkness. Am I being disgusting?”
“Is this anything like Comenius’s project?”
Wilkins leaned across and made as if to box Daniel’s ears. “It is his project! This was what he and I, and that whole gang of odd Germans-Hartlib, Haak, Kinner, Oldenburg-wanted to do when we conceived the Invisible College*back in the Dark Ages. But Mr. Comenius’s work was burned up in a fire, back in Moravia, you know.”
“Accidental, or-”
“ Excellentquestion, young man-in Moravia, one never knows. Now, if Comenius had listened to my advice and accepted the invitation to be Master of Harvard College back in ’41, it might’ve been different-”
“The colonists would be twenty-five years ahead of us!”
“Just so. Instead, Natural Philosophy flourishes at Oxford-less so at Cambridge-and Harvard is a pitiable backwater.”
“Why didn’t he take your advice, I wonder-?”
“The tragedy of these middle-European savants is that they are always trying to apply their philosophick acumen in the political realm.”
“Whereas the Royal Society is-?”
“ Ever so strictlyapolitical,” Wilkins said, and then favored Daniel with a stage-actor’s hugely exaggerated wink. “If we stayed away from politics, we could be flying winged chariots to the Moon within a few generations. All that’s needed is to pull down certain barriers to progress-”
“Such as?”
“Latin.”
“ Latin!?But Latin is-”
“I know, the universal language of scholars and divines, et cetera, et cetera. And it sounds so lovely, doesn’t it. You can say any sort of nonsense in Latin and our feeble University men will be stunned, or at least profoundly confused. That’s how the Popes have gotten away with peddling bad religion for so long-they simply say it in Latin. But if we were to unfold their convoluted phrases and translate them into a philosophical language, all of their contradictions and vagueness would become manifest.”
“Mmm… I’d go so far as to say that if a proper philosophical language existed, it would be impossible to express any false concept in it without violating its rules of grammar,” Daniel hazarded.
“You have just uttered the most succinct possible definition of it-I say, you’re not competing with me, are you?” Wilkins said jovially.
“No,” Daniel said, too intimidated to catch the humor. “I was merely reasoning by analogy to Cartesian analysis, where false statements cannot legally be written down, as long as the terms are understood.”
“The terms! That’s the difficult part,” Wilkins said. “As a way to write down the terms, I am developing the Philosophical Language and the Universal Character-which learned men of all races and nations will use to signify ideas.”
“I am at your service, sir,” Daniel said. “When may I begin?”
“Immediately! Before Hooke’s done with those frogs-if he comes in here and finds you idle, he’ll enslave you-you’ll be shovelling guts or, worse, trying the precision of his clocks by standing before a pendulum and counting… its… alternations… all… day… long.”
Hooke came in. His spine was all awry: not only stooped, but bent to one side. His long brown hair hung unkempt around his face. He straightened up a bit and tilted his head back so that the hair fell away to either side, like a curtain opening up to reveal a pale face. Stubble on the cheeks made him look even gaunter than he actually was, and made his gray eyes look even more huge. He said: “Frogs, too.”
“Nothing surprises me now, Mr. Hooke.”
“I put it to you that all living creatures are made out of them.”
“Have you considered writing any of this down? Mr. Hooke? Mr. Hooke?” But Hooke was already gone out into the stable-yard, off on some other experiment.
“Made out of what??” Daniel asked.
“Lately, every time Mr. Hooke peers at something with his Microscope he finds that it is divided up into small compartments, each one just like its neighbors, like bricks in a wall,” Wilkins confided.
“What do these bricks look like?”
“He doesn’t call them bricks. Remember, they are hollow. He has taken to calling them ‘cells’… but you don’t want to get caught up in all that nonsense. Follow me, my dear Daniel. Put thoughts of cells out of your mind. To understand the Philosophical Language you must know that all things in Earth and Heaven can be classified into forty different genera… within each of those, there are, of course, further subclasses.”
Wilkins showed him into a servant’s room where a writing desk had been set up, and papers and books mounded up with as little concern for order as the bees had shown in building their honeycomb. Wilkins moved a lot of air, and so leaves of paper flew off of stacks as he passed through the room. Daniel picked one up and read it: “Mule fern, panic-grass, hartstongue, adderstongue, moonwort, sea novelwort, wrack, Job’s-tears, broomrope, toothwort, scurvy-grass, sowbread, golden saxifrage, lily of the valley, bastard madder, stinking ground-pine, endive, dandelion, sowthistle, Spanish picktooth, purple loose-strife, bitter vetch.”
Wilkins was nodding impatiently. “The capsulate herbs, not campanulate, and the bacciferous sempervirent shrubs,” he said. “Somehow it must have gotten mixed up with the glandiferous and the nuciferous trees.”
“So, the Philosophical Language is some sort of botanical-”
“Look at me, I’m shuddering. Shuddering at the thought. Botany! Please, Daniel, try to collect your wits. In this stack we have all of the animals, from the belly-worm to the tyger. Here, the terms of Euclidean geometry, relating to time, space, and juxtaposition. There, a classification of diseases: pustules, boils, wens, and scabs on up to splenetic hypochondriacal vapours, iliac passion, and suffocation.”
“Is suffocation a disease?”
“Excellent question-get to work and answer it!” Wilkins thundered.
Daniel, meanwhile, had rescued another sheet from the floor: “Yard, Johnson, dick…”
“Synonyms for ‘penis,’ “ Wilkins said impatiently.
“Rogue, mendicant, shake-rag…”